To be honest I'm not sure which way it will take. Source balance is completely out the window. Weapon systems are implemented with a 'unique' vision that has warped balance quite a bit. PGI selectively kept and threw out rules. Sometimes for the better, sometimes just to make people like me bash my head against the wall.
Spoiler
Some relatively minor examples.
At one point there were some design pillars. Many of these are completely lost and tossed out the window, but listen to this one: "Role Warfare." The idea that you could choose what roles you want to play and that all roles would have some use. Scouts, brawlers, 'tanks', fire support, the list goes on. Well "balancing" matchmaker has enforced that all matches have relatively the same weight classes. Upcoming balance will force a 3 assault, 3 heavy, 3 medium, and 3 light compilation for both teams. The problem with this? If you're in the match you know exactly what the enemy has by looking at what you have. We just wiped out scouting between that and maps that are essentially 1 to 3 choke points.
ECM could have kept scouting alive if implemented according to its source material. Instead, it combines Electronic Warfare Equipment (inferior but basically a half baked ECM with Beagle Active Probe abilities) with Guardian ECM and Angel ECM (superior) at 0.5 tons less than Angel ECM with Stealth Armor (heavier, consumes critical slots) all for free. Now, instead of being a Klingon Cloaking Device as PGI made it, it could have denied "identification information" (i.e. you have a target square that you can lock on -- even if a bit delayed -- but you can't tell it's weapons, who it is, and about all you can really get is what it is) and as appropriate allowed the ECM user to create "Ghost" images or signatures. An example: The Raven 3-L might create a few false sensor readings in Grid Square A9. An enemy can pick up these false 'mechs' and then tell his friends that there's an enemy at A9. Well what do you know, the enemy says send a scout team. Scouts go out and find out it's false. Damn they just had something to do! Give 'em some money.
Suppressive fire support; the act of using 4 or more AC/2s to rapidly chain fire in a terrifying and ammunition conserving way is a very wimpy way of gimping your weapon in favor of fun and psychological warfare. Yes, you've made your autocannons nearly worthless but the rattle scares the heck out of your enemies and keeps them suppressed! A tactical maneuver, right? It's now punished with excessive heat that could shut you down in three seconds; obliterating yet another role.
Anyway. Back to minor things.
SRMs in MWO are essentially Battletech's MRMs. SRMs are supposed to be guided and homing. Streaks on the other hand are NOT physics defying missiles, they are simply SRMs with a smart computer that remote-controls them. Meanwhile SRMs are very stupid missiles that will go after any and every heat source they find, including each other.
LRMs from source cannot lock on non line of sight targets even with scouts; instead they worked more "Target at Baker Niner, North East Corner." Pop open the battlegrid, set the coordinates as the target, and bombard. Half way there, the LRMs start to steer towards enemy movement that they detect on their own. (This would really slow down combat, I admit, but at the same time LRMs wouldn't feel so useless without locks and in fact, it'd STOP the 'stay in cover' syndrome). Also they weren't so spam-worthy.
Autocannons in MWO, spit in the face of Battletech Autocannons in favor of Battletech Rifles.
A Rifle is a hand-held device for early battlemechs based on tank cannons. Slow to fire but hit very hard, had to be reloaded by 'hand' and fit well with the much more advanced neuro-helms at the time. A Heavy Rifle is 8 tons (AC/5 weight), does 9 damage in a single shot (-3 against modern armor which is too strong) and had a caliber similar to MWO's AC/10. Rifles were abandoned because they were too slow and single shots simply weren't powerful enough against armor.
Autocannons in Battletech are rarely single shot weapons and instead are multi-shot burst or fully automatic. AC/2s start from 30 to 80mm. The largest mech-mounted caliber AC/20 that is the only single shot in existence, is 203mm and Clan only in the form of a UAC/20 mounted exclusively on the Cauldron Born due to the shape and stability of the mech. (Think Stalker, but longer body length with huge arms and huge feet on short stubby legs with the weight of a Catapult and the height of a Jenner).
The largest Inner Sphere AC/20 that is mobile in a form other than a capital ship, dropship, or other spacecraft and used on the ground is actually tank-mounted in the form of the Chemjet Gun. It is a 4 round slow-fire-burst AC/20 where each shot does 5 damage at 185mm. The next biggest AC/20 is carried by the Hunchback at 180mm and is a 5 shot burst weapon where each shot does 4 damage. Other famous ones include the Crusher Super Heavy Cannon, a 150mm autocannon that fires 10 shots at 2 damage each at either a slow automatic rate on a belt-feed or a rapid burst fire magazine (cassette) feed. It varied depending on which variant as different manufacturers tweaked their version of the Crusher to be competitive with one another
Some AC/20s fire up to 100 bullets. (The Victor's Pontiac 100 comes to mind). Some AC/2s average between 4 and 20 shots to do 2 damage.
Mechs get artificial engine limits, hardpoints forced on them -- both are good things and totally b.s. compared to the source material. But the armor equality rule for all equal-weight mechs is kept? For some mechs the only thing that they had going for them was superior armor. Example: The "worthless" MWO 60 ton Dragon at stock has more armor than most 65 ton mechs, than some 70 ton mechs, and more armor than some of the Victor (80 tons) variants and almost on par with the Stalker (85 tons). The all powerful Shadowhawk (55 tons)? One of them has the armor of a Raven 2x (35 tons), but the firepower to outclass the Hunchback and a LOT more speed too. The almighty Jagermech? It's got less armor than most mechs, but in the way MWO did its weapons, is the deadliest thing on two legs to ever walk the face of Battletech or Mechwarrior.
Needless to say just about every weapon system in MWO has taken a liberal license.
What irks me most is the heat system. MWO is the only mechwarrior game in history to have a rising threshold (maximum heat). It encourages high accuracy pinpoint strikes and allows intense weapon spam. Add to it that MWO's fastest and most powerful weapons produce the lowest heat out of all the weapon systems -- because PGI switched the high heat lasers from instant damage to beam over time and autocannons from shots over time to instant damage... and what we have is a balancing nightmare.
For a while PGI was doing balancing every single week and somehow kept making progressively stupid decisions. Finally they took the slow approach to see and analyze and investigate. What did they come up with? They simply reverted a bunch of weapons right back to the core tabletop values and suddenly something close to balance was achieved that did more than silly and expensive things like "Heatscale" (ghost heat).
Right now, I don't think it will get any more diluted so to speak. But for genuine substance it will be a long while. Some things mentioned on the lead designer's agenda is to completely rework the pilot and mech skill trees. Example, with master level the 22.5% acceleration of basics becomes 55% faster acceleration. It's simply too much. Heat Containment raises your maximum heat allowed by 20%, letting you spam even more weapons down range and bypass other balancing factors like Weapon Heatscale.
There was mentioned in an Ask the Devs that repair and rearm is on a backburner which may be revisited when Community Warfare is released. Also on that time line, cockpit monitors and mech knockdowns. We may or may not see the return of the original heat penalties (i.e. 80% heat, your weapons, heatsinks, and ammo begin to lose their health and may be destroyed by your own heat).
I don't think we'll ever see engine destruction in the truest sense of the word (MGs would be the most overpowered weapon in the game if we do) or actuator damage return. That makes me sad.
But here's to hoping.
(Far as other niche titles, somehow Hawken is skirting by with 30,000 per map and about 10,000 per mech. The maps are generally a lot better yet smaller. Consider that their mechs are barely bigger than 'person' sized and thus the maps are Call of Duty MP-level sized. The mechs are incredibly simple. Their development is in house though and highly Korean.
PGI I've noticed used to and might still outsource a large amount of what gets done and it's highly Canadian/American. It is also worth noting that MWO struggles because of the choice to use true to scale sizes on everything, so 500 meters really is 500 meters as in the same 200 meters that would take a player character in Crysis a good 4 minutes to trek and you're doing it in seconds, on a game engine that's pumping up to 5,000 meters of distance at any one moment... when it's designed to only give no more than 1,500 with reasonably higher detail even if on a much smaller scale).
I believe the game you are thinking of is Star Citizen -- far from release but a very promising game of the not free to play genre. Its graphics remind me of closed beta MWO.
Great info again.
Ok, battletech fans must be pretty frustrated, as a sim player (passionate about things being correct) I can definitely sympathise.
It's odd, its not true to Battletech for a number of reasons I expect, financial most likely, yet it maintains a style of play that will turn away 90% of potential customers. The client base is older, cashed up and will spend extensively on a subject they love, but are being alienated by the non battletech direction.
So who is left to pay $240 for the clan pack that I was happy to spend on (maybe a cool hundred?) before clicking and subsequently falling out of my sim pit, some poor parents somewhere will have a heart attack next credit card bill...lol
Really?....they are polygons with a subtraction algorithm on armour and some dice rolls on internals, add low res cockpits, ok, I couldn't do it, but it's not high end physics, FMs and ballistics calculations or complex system modelling...(Yeah I admit I want the fuzzy dice and the hula girl dammit).
Anyway, just interesting stuff for me as I'm enjoying the game, just odd stuff, I can't say I have seen similar, hopefully the community and the devs will reach a common ground.
PGI's aiming at trying to pick up newer, younger players for a new generation of gamers. They've stated as much. Those who aren't happy are the 2% "on an island."
Really though, the clan package isn't a bad deal. It amounts to 30 dollars per 3 'configurations' of each chassis + various little extras.
Since you kind of have to 'buy' the arms, legs, side torsos, etc. to create your own configurations it saves you quite a bit in cbills.
The problem that I saw with it is that it forces you to start with the lights and work your way up. Then after the Dire Wolf, you have to work through another light.
Or you can do the a la carte to get the mediums, heavies and assaults for the same price and save 60 dollars by not spending it on the easy to acquire lights -- and completely lose out on the package benefits.
I play regardless. But honestly I'd still be collecting heroes and already have me a clan package if this was still headed in the simulator direction that it had in closed beta.
I miss the old days. 4:23. "Son of a ----! He rammed me!"
Ok, battletech fans must be pretty frustrated, as a sim player (passionate about things being correct) I can definitely sympathise.
Tabletop players, maybe. Coming from lots of MW2/3/4, I personally love the design. It may not be close to lore or the tabletop in various ways, but jumping into a mech felt very natural for me. Almost a year later, I am still having a blast in this great horribly broken game. Still, not buying a package unless the patches up until May have some really Wow!!! additions.
Fair call, but you gotta feel for the core battletech guys. Personally I'm having a ball, as long as it stays stompy I will be playing for a long time.
I've often said that this isn't the Battletech game that I wanted. Too much customization, too much tech, it feels too fast.
That being said, I have to be realistic. A large chunk of BT players love all the tech, and they can't wait for the clan stuff. The insane customization is half the fun. And while it isn't the game that I wanted, a lot of those players would look at my game and think that it was missing all of what they thought of as Battletech.
So I'll just be happy that I can run around in mechs that I basically recognize, using weapons and terminology that hit the nostalgia in me and keeps me coming back. Do I think the game is perfect? No. But it's still a lot of fun. And I can't wait and see what CW actually brings to the plate.
Agree on the too fast. So fast the game has hit detection problems and many of them. So the solution? Make the mechs even faster. *Bashes head.*
Personally I'd like to see a Battletech game that revolves around more than just the mechs.
If you really think about it, Battletech has been doing the "Titan Fall" for more than 30 years before Titan Fall even came out.
Though yes, in its own right the game can be fun for a while. It desperately needs that community warfare aspect.
But... I wonder what purpose a dropship will serve after the 3/3/3/3 system, since the great prospect about dropships included increasing your allowed drop weight, reinforcement mechs ("waves" without recovery in between) and so on. None of which seem feasible now.
Edit: Related. Very entertaining read.
2
